Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 306 posts

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#31

Post by jonknee »

nubela wrote: post #8
sbierwagen wrote: post #2

Jeremy Palmer is a SEO marketer, who also appears to be doing some scammy affiliate thing. Google considers his links low quality because they are low quality.

He might have low quality links, but his points are still valid. it's not our perogative to link the way Google us to. We should link however we want, and it is up to Google to figure which is link is good, and which are bad.

> it's not our perogative to link the way Google us to.

Who said it was? Google didn't ask him to do anything. A random person on the internet did. I frequently get emails from random people on the internet who ask all sorts of insanely idiotic things that have little basis in reality.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#32

Post by spindritf »

Nofollow link to a human user is just as good as a regular, do-follow link. From reader's perspective this changes nothing so who cares? Game the link attributes as best as you think you can and let robots figure it out.

They're only breaking their own ranking algo.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#34

Post by Matt_Cutts »

richbradshaw wrote: post #25
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #5

I talked about this phenomenon recently on This Week in Google with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani: http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google/248 Skip to 4:15 in to listen to the discussion. Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes in and says "Hey, can you remove this link from your site?" Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and works to clean up…

Situation #1 happens fairly regularly - do you have/can you do a video that can be sent to the company asking for links to be removed which clearly explains what is happening? We have had clients such as a small bathroom fitting company where the company that made the showers that they fit demanded that our client remove all links to them. There was a degree of bad feeling, as our client fit a lot of showers from tha…

We have made a video for sites that received a notice for unnatural links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UFHCw4Q_FQ

I thought I'd made at least one video for sites that have been getting link removal requests. I'll check, and if we haven't made one then I'd agree that would be useful. Thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#35

Post by ronnier »

greenyoda wrote: post #26
ronnier wrote: post #15

I own http://ihackernews.com which reformats HackerNews for mobile phones. I had a DMCA takedown notice sent to me on behalf of a website owner who didn't want me linking to their site. My hosting provider gave me 24 hours to remove the link or else they'd cancel my account. The owner of the link claimed that their Google rankings were dropping because my site, iHackernews, linked to their site. With this, they were…

Why didn't you challenge the takedown notice as being fraudulent? As far as I know, DMCA does not prohibit linking to web pages; it's only about hosting someone else's copyrighted content on your site (or maybe posting links to pirated content).

I just don't have time to deal with it. Removing it was the quickest way possible for me to resolve the issue and not have my account closed.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#36

Post by btown »

jawns wrote: post #18

"As a publisher I refuse to nofollow any links, outside of banners and advertisements. I compel you to do the same." I believe you mean "implore."

Be warned, if you refuse to comply, he might link to you without "nofollow" as punishment!

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#37

Post by Angostura »

anon1385 wrote: post #6
sbierwagen wrote: post #2

Jeremy Palmer is a SEO marketer, who also appears to be doing some scammy affiliate thing. Google considers his links low quality because they are low quality.

> Google considers his links low quality because they are. So what? Why should I have to care that Jeremy Palmer (or any other person) is linking to my site? The point of the article is that webmasters are going around trying to get links to their sites removed because it might get them penalised by Google. That is not natural or desirable behaviour. Site owners shouldn't have to care about that. Many have resorted t…

> The point of the article is that webmasters are going around trying to get links to their sites removed because it might get them penalised by Google.

That's because previously webmasters we going around trying to get links to their sites added because it might get them rewarded by Google.

Google is trying to prevent the aberrant behaviour that the success of Pagerank caused in the structure of the Web, unfortunately there can be some collateral damage.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#38

Post by jonknee »

lingben wrote: post #22
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #5

I talked about this phenomenon recently on This Week in Google with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani: http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google/248 Skip to 4:15 in to listen to the discussion. Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes in and says "Hey, can you remove this link from your site?" Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and works to clean up…

Matt, this does not address whatsoever the point being brought up. And in case you missed it, I will try to cite it as clearly as possible here: This is a case where google wants people to mold the internet according to what their current incarnation of their algorithm says the way it should be. Rather than google trying to mold its algorithm to understand the internet, natural links vs. spams, and their respective a…

> Google here is saying that all links from this site are suspect, even when the link in question is 100% valid, quality and relevant.

I read the article and didn't see any mention of what site the link was on or even what site it was linking to. It's impossible to say if it was legitimately spammy or not, but either way Google never asked him to do anything. Someone who didn't know about the Link Disavow Tool decided on their own to email him about taking the link down.

You would have a good point prior to the Link Disavow Tool, but it has solved this (very tricky) problem.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#39

Post by nso »

I run a decent sized discussion forum. I literally get 3 of these emails a day. I have an auto-reply that goes something along the lines of "Unless you previously have hired shady companies to do shady SEO for you on the forums, these links are organic. Do not contact me again regarding this subject."

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#40

Post by Matt_Cutts »

lingben wrote: post #22
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #5

I talked about this phenomenon recently on This Week in Google with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani: http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google/248 Skip to 4:15 in to listen to the discussion. Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes in and says "Hey, can you remove this link from your site?" Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and works to clean up…

Matt, this does not address whatsoever the point being brought up. And in case you missed it, I will try to cite it as clearly as possible here: This is a case where google wants people to mold the internet according to what their current incarnation of their algorithm says the way it should be. Rather than google trying to mold its algorithm to understand the internet, natural links vs. spams, and their respective a…

It's not just Google that recommends to avoid link spamming. For example, at http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html you can read where Bing said "You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path."

When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get caught.

One of the reasons that Google is such a popular search engine is that we do take spam seriously and we take action to counter spam.

Post reply on HN